"Upside Down" Lightning as Strong as Earth-bound Bolts

Lightning that shoots upward from clouds can be as powerful as the strongest bolts that strike the ground, according to researchers who caught the strange phenomenon on film. (Watch the video, slowed down to show how the lightning bolt moves.)

Six months into the project, tropical storm Cristobal moved over the region, and the video system captured a gigantic jet rising from the tempest.

"Essentially nothing was known about the electrical nature of gigantic jets, [so] we immediately started analyzing our data to understand what was going on," Cummer said.

The researchers found that the upward lightning carried 144 Coulombs of electrical charge.

"This gigantic jet carried as much charge to the upper atmosphere as the very biggest cloud-to-ground lightning strokes about a hundred to a thousand times bigger than a typical lightning stroke," Cummer said.

Totally Shocked

The finding totally shocked the research team, since it's the first clear proof that an electric charge can move directly from the troposphere into the ionosphere, two layers of Earth's atmosphere.

Until now "we didn't know whether gigantic jets actually made electrical contact with the upper atmosphere to discharge the thunderstorm," Cummer said.

"That thunderstorms can be electrically connected to the upper atmosphere and push quite a bit of electric charge up there is a surprise."

Findings appear in the August 23 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.